It was only an instant, the instant of the somnambulist who walks to the edge of the void and suddenly awakens. Across Julia’s face flashed a fleeting appeal for help. But then it subsided back into reserve. Just in time she remembered that she could appeal to this man’s sensuality, to his anger, to his disdain, but not to his compassion. She left his side and went to sit with her back to him in a rocking chair.

“You were telling me about discipline.”

Leonardo began pacing the room, glad that the conversation had turned toward his natural element: action. When he was in the throes of an important project, all other ideas, all other events, paled and disappeared.

“Discipline is a very simple thing: a few rules that can be taught and learned. But since we have neither the time nor the place to do that directly, we’ll have to rely on a kind of . . . of. . . .”

“Manual.”

“No, that’s not what it’s called. It has its own name. Let me remember. . . . Directives. . . . That’s it. Military directives.”

“Are you going to issue them?”

“I already have the essentials, I’ve been turning them over in my head from the beginning. But I need someone whose mind is more polished than mine to write it all out clearly for me.”

“A letter-writer?”

“No, por Dios. Someone of a higher class.”

“A lawyer.”

“Fortunately there’s no lack of them in Ciudad Real.”

“What do you want him to say?”

“What he knows as well as I do: that this problem of the Indians and their uprisings is not going to be resolved as long as we go on making excuses for evading it. We have to cut it out at the root.”

“How?”

“Like the song says, the best Indian is a dead Indian.”

“And you think a piece of paper will be enough to make the Coletos dedicate themselves to killing the Indians.”

“It will be a good push in the right direction. Until now they’ve had scruples: they don’t want an Indian to die any more than they want their herds of cattle to be diminished. They feel that the Indians are something that belongs to them and they don’t fully understand that the Government has taken them away. And that’s why, as I’ve said many times, the Indians must be finished off.”

The simplicity of this conclusion stunned Julia, who could do nothing but burst out laughing.

“The ladies of Ciudad Real complain that they can never have done with the plague of red ants. And you want their husbands to finish off all the Indians!”